Alt for Norge Daily Journal: Day 53 - June 14, 2012 (Episode 9)

Today was a pretty bad day in my world. I’ve had a couple of moments where I wasn’t happy, but today was my worst!

Our bus for our journey up the mountainside.

We got started at 10:00 a.m. by boarding an old school bus. Immediately, we started guessing that we may be doing something school related, but I was still hoping that it would be something sports or Olympic related, since Lillehammer is the home of the 1994 Winter Olympics!

A shot of the crew getting ready for competition
introductions at Telemarkstunet.

After a 30-minute filmed drive, we were at the top of the mountain and walking into an old complex with several grass-roofed, 1800’s-like

structures, including one with a goat on top of it! We did our usual filmed walk-around with us exploring all over this new place, along with many different takes, but then they had us sit down so Henriette could welcome us to the area and introduce our first competition. (Actually, this would be our 1^st introduction, but would be for the 2^nd competition. It’s going to require some additional practice, so they wanted to give us a little more time with it.) Each one of us would have to learn and play a famous Norwegian song on a recorder! It was then very obvious to me that we would not be doing anything sports related or physical! We haven’t done a single elimination-competition that’s been physical and we’ve only done a few team competitions that would resemble anything physical at all. In fact, only one has been purely physical! Completely different from what I’ve seen of the first two seasons. With that, I played nice on camera, but was starting to stew inside.

You can see the excitement beaming out of my eyes as I look forward to
the hours of practice that I would put in on this beautiful instrument!

When we were done, we did interviews on camera, where I was able to get out a little of my frustration by making some sarcastic remarks. Then, on camera, we did a whole lot of practicing of the song with a local teacher. Off camera, we all continued to practice everything over and over! The problem was that there wasn’t a whole lot of space on the property for us to practice, so no matter where you went, you could hear one of the other members playing. It was really awful. Five very novice musicians, playing a terribly annoying instrument over and over! AWFUL!

After practice, they had us come in for a filmed dinner, which usually means bad things. It wasn’t too bad though. We had a sour-cream/rice-based substance called “rommegrat”. It had a really bad texture, but didn’t taste too awful with some added butter and cinnamon-sugar.

Once we finished with dinner, Henriette came in to make an announcement. She talked about folk-lore and Norwegian trolls and then handed us a book of folklores. It became very obvious that our next challenge would be some kind of test off of the stories in that book! That whole stewing that I was doing completely flipped into pissed-off!! From everything I understood of this show, it’s been more physically-based in the past, however I’ve heard they’ve received some flak for that. With that, I understand if they need to change things up a bit, but to completely do a 180^o and never do anything physical completely sucks! It’s not what I expected at all and each week my desire to do something physically related grows more and more. I just figured it had to happen at some point, but it never seems to come. Then, they announce two competitions to us in one day and neither are physical, plus we’re in freaking Lillehammer!!! What the fuck?! I lost it. We finished dinner and went outside. I sat at a table with everyone when poor Johnathan said the wrong thing, “I don’t know, I just want to have fun!” This innocent, but annoying line burst my growing, heated balloon. I sprung up and snapped at him, “You do that, Johnathan!!” It wasn’t overly mean, but with Johnathan being sensitive, me being obviously angry, and me storming off, it was pretty bad. I headed in one direction and Brita said I couldn’t go that way, which made me even more upset! I responded, “Where can I fucking go? I need a place to breath!” She pointed in one direction and that is where I went. Immediately, when I got there, I pulled out my camera and found the pictures of you making a funny face at the airport right before I left. Instantly, I felt so much better. It was like I could feel a calm come over me! Not more than one minute later, here comes Brita. I felt really bad! They’re so good to us here and really try to take care of us and I just went off over something so small! I was an idiot, but this time away from home is really wearing on me! I immediately went to apologize, but before I could get anything out, she simply said, “We’ll talk later.” That’s when I thought I was in deep trouble. She told me I needed to do an interview. (They have a tendency to quickly set up interviews for anyone that is getting overly emotional!) On my way to the interview, I went over to Johnathan and apologized several times. Following that, I apologized to the executive producer, Thor, and then went to my interview. I was able to control myself from that point out and was fine, but still fearful of that talk I was going to have with Brita!

A troll! This thing was waiting for us when we
entered the movie theater room to watch a movie
about troll-hunters!

After everyone finished their interviews, they sat us down and gave us some information off camera. First, they let us know that we only need to focus on 6 of the 20 stories in the folk book, which was a huge relief, but then followed that with a demand. They saw how agitated we all were and how stressed we were to have to learn the recorder and read those stories and told us we need to take a break. They commanded us to take the next two hours off and go watch a movie. No books, no recorders, just some good times. So, that is what we did and it helped greatly! It was a movie about troll-hunters and the whole thing was in Norske without subtitles, but it was still good to watch and pretty entertaining.

When it was all over, it was about 11:00 p.m.. We knew that we didn’t have to do the recorder until the day after tomorrow, so all of us went back to read. This is when my talk came with Brita.

Fortunately, it wasn’t as bad as I thought it was going to be. In fact, it wasn’t bad at all. She simply wanted to make sure I was alright and wanted to know why I was so mad earlier today. I explained myself as best as I could, bringing up my desire for more physical challenges and that’s when she informed me that they did, as we had guessed, made a change to the show. Due to a request from TV Norge, they had decided to make a conscious effort to remove a lot of the physical aspects of the show. In essence, they went a whole new direction with the challenges and decided to use a lot more performing and mental challenges. I explained that it all made sense to me, I just wish I had known it, because I guarantee I wouldn’t have been as upset. She seemed to understand, but we continued to talk for a little while, just to make sure. After it was all said and done, we hugged it out and said goodnight. Everything is good! Phew!

However, this new insight lit a fire in me! The way I look at it is they’ve gone a different direction, so the athlete doesn’t get an advantage and so someone else has a better chance to win! If that’s how it’s going to be, then it’s on!! I’ll just study harder and make it so I, “the athlete”, still wins!! So, that’s what I did. I stayed up two hours past everyone else reading, re-reading, making flash cards and knowing those stories inside and out! I will win this challenge tomorrow!!

A crappy day over, but a huge fire is lit!!

Day 53 Over!!